Night on Earth (1991)

This is a truly amazing movie which I love. It has five different stories, each on a different city, with very different people, but all in a taxi. All the people are very different, with different background, ambitions, culture and personality, but in the end, so similar. I loved every part of it, some of them are very funny, others touching, depressing, heartbreaking, enjoyable or simply beautiful. They are all wonderful portraits of the city in which they happen. They don't show touristic locations, but how the cities really are and how people behave and think. Every story is well told, with great pace, amazing, believable dialogs and realistic characters that you get to know very well in little time. They work both together and alone. They're all great and I can't choose my favorite.

In the first segment, a young tomboy taxi driver meets a wealthy talent seeker, who wants to cast her in a movie. In New York, an afro American meets an immigrant, his cab driver, lost in the city. In Paris, a blind girl takes a ride with an irritable cab driver from the Ivory Coast and they talk about life and blindness. In Rome, a cab driver picks up a priest and starts confessing, and in Helsinki a miserable driver picks up three drunks and they speak about the most depressing things that ever happened to them.

The direction is amazing in all its simplicity. The camera angles are steady, usually focusing no the actors and allowing you to concentrate on the dialogs.But there are some that show the city, the cars passing, the buildings, lovers in the middle of the night, junkies, etc, and these have unusual quality.

The acting is great by everyone. Winona Ryder, frequently criticized, is in my opinion very funny and totally different from her other roles. I really enjoyed her acting. Gena Rowlands plays her "opposite" in a nice, underacting way. Armin Mueller-Stahl is very touching and expressive (the moment he says he was a clown is very beautiful), with an amazing use of his eyes. Giancarlo Esposito and Jennifer Perez are fun to watch, too. Béatrice Dalle is incredibly charismatic and believable as a blind young woman, and Isaach De Bankolé is good. Roberto Benigni is about as hilarious as you can get, in his one man show. His speech is obviously very funny, but Benigni makes it mind blowing. Some will hate it, though I couldn't stop laughing. Matti Pellonpää delivers his speech in a dramatic, depressive way but without overacting.

The cinematography and the music are beautiful, make this movie feel nostalgic and help linking the segments. This is a very original, worthwhile movie.

Fmovies: In terms of perspective on life, these comic-philosophic taxi rides may be the most uplifting scenes in Jarmusch's oeuvre. The first of five segments (in L.A.) deals with Winona Ryder (in a broad, self-conscious performance) as a cab driver who picks up Gena Rowlands, who wants to put her in a movie. Rowlands is subtle and complex: she's a rich bitch with a soft side, but we don't know if she's the former because she's a player or if she's the latter because she wants to use Ryder. What Jarmusch is going for is to contrast the social classes -- he has an obvious, unfunny line where Ryder's character says she's never been to the executive terminal at the airport before -- but what's really interesting is seeing, since Jarmusch is usually a male-oriented director, how he handles women (one a tomboy, one in a position of power).

It's obvious that the little idea of a movie about four taxi cab drivers is just a thin story that gives Jarmusch an excuse to work with certain actors, like Rowlands, whose late, great husband he adores. He goes for cultural miscommunication in the New York story (which is the film's most tender and brotherly), the warring cultures within a city, where a black man (Giancarlo Esposito) who can't land a cab fights with his Puerto Rican girlfriend while being badly driven around by former circus clown (Armin Mueller-Stahl, in a goofy, charming performance). Jarmusch makes brilliant statements on race and color in the Paris segment, with a sassy blind woman who's aware of what her driver is thinking of her -- and who turns our expectations on their head twice, without coming back to where we started. Benigni, who doesn't play the clown, is nevertheless the funniest in the Rome ride: he talks aloud to himself and outdoes and predates "American Pie" by almost a decade. The final, Helsinki section is the most powerful. When the cabbie tries to one-up the sob story by one of his three passengers, the conclusion seems to be that he wins; the two conscious passengers seem to think their unconscious friend's troubles are insignificant, as if they can't both be sad. 7/10

A fantastic piece of entertainment: five little stories, five cities, four languages. That's all. This movie has no message but it portrays five regions of the world most sensitively.

The L.A. episode is the weakest. It is not bad but it has one big problem: it is the first one. People start watching the movie and expect something sensational. This first episode cannot present anything spectacular, only first class character acting. There are no big surprises or twists, the episode is not particularly funny or anything. Honestly, when I saw the first minutes of this movie I thought: `O dear, I'm going to fall asleep!'

Then, the N.Y. story came. This one made me laugh real hard, and it made Armin Mueller Stahl one of my favourite actors. I started to love this movie, and I was well prepared for the Paris episode, which is, in my opinion the best, the most satisfying of them.

I found the story of the Roberto Benigni episode rather stupid, but his talent in exaggerating (so he did this even seven years before 1999's Oscar ceremony!) made up for it.

Then, the huge contrast: The liveliest episode is followed by the dreariest. Finnish workers tell each other stories from their lives, each trying to tell the saddest.

`Night on Earth' is not a movie for everybody but I think it is, in any case, the ideal movie to watch on television at two o'clock in the morning.

Night on Earth fmovies. I suppose people will typically talk about they loved the NY and Rome stories, but hated the Helsinki segment, or vice-versa, or whatever. This probably comes from thinking of the entire movie as belonging to a single genre--drama, comedy, satire. If you take each story by itself, though, with an open mind, you will find yourself being entertained (mostly) in five different ways. Although of course we will all have our favorites.

I wondered briefly why there wasn't a segment set in Hong Kong, Singapore, Japan--to make it truly global. Of course it wouldn't be night at the same time on that side of the world. Jarmusch should have done it anyway.

Some think the movie is too long. But this is obviously a movie you don't need to watch in a single sitting; indeed, for the reason stated above, it's perhaps best watched a little at a time.

No one I ever mention this film to has heard of it, let alone seen it! I actually tried to see Thelma and Louise at the cinema when Night on Earth came out, but as it was sold out, I saw this instead - what a lucky break! The film is actually 5 short films of around twenty minutes, each one a taxi journey, taking place at the exact same moment in 5 cities across the world, from LA to Helsinki, via New York, Paris and Rome.

Without ruining the surprises contained (its unexpectedness is one of its delights) the film covers numerous emotions. At times it is utterly hilarious, at others it's sad and moving. It is pacy and yet considered, the characters are well painted, both by the writing and the acting, and the story lines engrossing yet punchy. There are some sub-titles, by the way, but please don't let that put you off. It's not one of those intellectual "aren't I clever" films.

If you like your films classy, well written, well acted, intelligent, thought provoking yet accessible, and with a great soundtrack (Tom Waits), then Night on Earth is for you! Share it!

Jim Jarmusch, a director who never neglects to find the time for the little moments, glances, exchanges in dialog, that bring out the better (or lesser) in people, puts his skills to full force in Night on Earth. Another in his several episodic-style films, this time he pushes forward his great use of pure conversational, and emotional, comedy, as well as drama. In fact, this may be one of the best from the 90's of that kind that came out (i.e. mixing comedy and drama to create some bittersweet vignettes). Inspiration of course pours out from European cinema, but even in the American segments there's a sense of genuine pathos with the characters. Sometimes one style was kept totally consistent, with all comedy in episode four or all tragedy in episode five, or the two styles went back and forth like in the first two. The third remains the more ambiguous, and maybe more uncomfortable, segment of the bunch, and even if it might be the lesser of them all it's still fascinating due to the actors.

But to get back to the humanism that comes on in the film, it's not something at all uncommon to Jarmusch's work. In Ghost Dog it goes a long way to help us not be too left out of the world of Whitaker's character, or it makes every lady seem all the more odd and unique in Broken Flowers. Here since it is met with a more realistic approach, with situations that could be happening right now at night in these cities, I'm almost reminded of Renoir. Particularly in the second segment in New York, where there's the perfect divide between lightness and over-the-top- lightness being in Armin Mueller-Stahl's performance as Helmut (German ex-clown turned un-knowing cabbie) and Giancarlo Esposito's performance as Yo-yo. Maybe it's because scenes like these usually wouldn't make it into 'mainstream' fare, but a sequence like this showcases some great dialog on both sides (and when Rosie Perez comes in, all bets are off). Stahl especially makes the scenes work in-particular as he almost seems to inhabit this person of an outsider in the (taken for granted) amazing space of NYC.

To say which one was my overall favorite might be a little picky, as every one of them had something to offer differently. There was the cute, and slightly awkward, scenes with Ryder and Rowlands (maybe one of Ryder's few gems in her career too, mostly based on style). The segment in Paris, again, may make one feel a little uncomfortable, but that might be the point. And I loved how Beatrice Dalle's role went effortlessly between the bizarre and the almost ironically compassionate. It's also the segment which provides a little extra bitter of a touch by way of the Ivory Coast cabbie, however it does come to pass as being about two outsiders thrust into a strange little moment in life. Roberto Benigni's segment was drop dead funny, which is surprising considering the hit or miss ways of Jarmusch's comedy. But Benigni is so outrageous in his long monologue its no wonder what becomes of his passenger. It's a terrific mix between Benigni's voracious style of fast (but not too fast) speech, and a sort of silent-film kind of comedy, likely out of Buster Keaton or something. And all of this is accentuated by a carefully controlled mis en scene of driving (which is always visually endearing), where right when you're expecting there to be a cut it waits one or two extra seconds. It's a film with a sweet rhythm that doesn't drag like in Jarmusch at his worst.

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